Authors: Michelle Huneven
In their tiny Tenderloin apartment, they talked and wept and held each other, while all around them junkies and pimps moaned and beat their heads against walls.
Weeks passed without any decision; then David received news that his father had been fired, the villagers evicted, and that they had moved en masse into the Rito Town Park. David and Mina returned to Rito immediately. David, finding his family and former neighbors living in cars and tents, went straight to the park’s pay phone. Union leaders and lawyers arrived within hours to organize the villagers and
fight a coalition of valley ranchers led by Mina’s father, who wanted the villagers evicted from the town’s park as well.
Mina, visibly pregnant, had gone home to the Fitzgerald adobe. Given El Cuarto’s current temper and David’s role in the opposing camp, she knew better than to name the baby’s father. “I’ll tell them some guy,” she assured David. “Some guy who got me drunk and took advantage after a football game.” She’d never been to a football game in her life.
She and David agreed to meet daily in a small, neglected tangelo grove way up by the lake.
T
HE TANGELOS
were an abandoned strain, yellow and the size of large lemons or small grapefruits, with pale orange meat. Their sweetness was tempered by quinine, whose bitterness inflamed and then numbed the back of the throat. Though the fruit was popular as a novelty item in the 1920s and ’30s, sweeter strains had since been developed, and so few people found the quinine tang compelling anymore, the grove went unpicked.
David acquired a Huffy bike with fat, leaky tires. The tangelo grove was five or six miles uphill, near the lake and deep in Fitzgerald property. He went the last ten minutes on foot, through the trees.
The pregnancy had made Mina enormous and emotionally fragile. She accused David of not loving her, of abandoning his own child, of preferring politics to love, and drinking in bars instead of spending time with her. She threatened to tell her parents about him. “They’ll
make
you marry me,” she said.
“Or have my legs broken.”
“They’ll learn to love you because I do.”
He begged her not to tell them, not yet, fearing that El Cuarto would exact his revenge on the villagers.
Invariably, Mina broke into tears and, mortified by her emotions, fled. He was tempted to follow and soothe her, but he was also relieved to see her go.
F
ROM
living outside in the wet spring, the dispossessed villagers came down with flu and bronchitis. Many also suffered from gastrointestinal ailments due to drinking from park spigots whose water was piped directly from the river. Even with donations from nearby churches, food supplies were insufficient. The park had flush toilets, but no showers or hot water. David, in meetings with union negotiators, lobbied for sturdier temporary housing, yet nobody had any clear ideas about what that was or how to go about constructing it. Meanwhile, the lawyers lamented that the workers had left their village, thereby relinquishing their squatters’ rights—never mind that they’d been intimidated by poised bulldozers and armed guards.
During the day, when not strategizing with lawyers and activists, David gathered with the men at the El Nido, the cafe in Rito that predated Happy Yolanda’s. They drank coffee, sat at tables, and were relieved to be indoors, dry, away from the damp tents and suffering women. David stayed in the El Nido longer and longer, switching from coffee to beer after lunch and sometimes forgetting to climb down off his bar stool when the time came to start the long uphill bike ride to the tangelo grove. He began keeping the company of a few older men who were known for their drinking capacities.
He was half drunk in the El Nido when news came in that Mina Fitzgerald had taken a bad fall down stairs in her father’s adobe. She’d broken an arm, and someone said she’d gone into premature labor. That was too bad, the village men agreed, but bad luck ran in that family. First, the
doña
drinking herself ill, then a daughter pregnant without a husband, now this. The men laughed a little. No matter how rich you are, they said, trouble sniffs you out, finds your door.
David sat at the bar until nobody would associate his leaving with the news about the rich, knocked-up
gringa.
He hitchhiked to the Sisters of Mercy Hospital in Buchanan, where he found Mina sitting up
in bed. One arm in a cast, she gazed at him with such deadness that he already felt forgotten.
“You okay?” he whispered. “Is the baby okay?”
With her good hand, she waved him away. “It’s over,” she said. “My father will talk to you.”
El Cuarto materialized behind him.
Even at such close range, William Fitzgerald IV wasn’t a large man. He was actually rather delicate: white-haired, soft-spoken, executive in manner, his clothes the color of sand. “I believe we can settle this little matter quietly, in a civilized fashion,” he said, or something like it; David would never have a precise memory of this scene, which sat in his mind as a blur of undifferentiated pain. The two men moved out of the room, down the hall, where El Cuarto produced a cashier’s check made out for fifteen thousand dollars. “To help you finish medical school. No strings attached.”
David would remember arguments, but could never be sure if he spoke them aloud. At some point, a private cop materialized in regulation blue.
El Cuarto, calm and condescending, went on as if speaking to a child who didn’t know the language. “Your name will not appear on any birth certificate. You will not have to pay for anything, ever. Nothing more will be expected of you. Nothing more desired from you. So far as we are concerned, Mina was the victim of an unfortunate encounter in college.”
David demanded to speak to Mina again. There was a scuffle, the security man’s creak, the abrasive brush of ink-dark gabardine. Once David was pinioned, another paper was held up for his scrutiny: a restraining order, he was told, signed in Mina’s half-cursive printing.
David didn’t know, of course, that a summons and a hearing were required before a true restraining order could go into effect. For him, the document produced a silent, raging clarity. The room with its chairs, the cop, El Cuarto’s quiet, raspy voice, seemed to be crystallizing. “Just let me talk to her,” he said.
“That, my boy, you will never do again.”
The check reappeared.
“I’ll only tear it up,” David said, which made the father laugh out loud in his muted, genteel, sand-colored voice. “I wish you would. Oh, how I wish you would.”
David did not tear up the check. He cashed it and gave ten thousand
dollars to Rafael to be used for the villagers. The rest he used to travel in Thailand, Malaysia, India.
D
AVID
was in Goa, drowsing on the beach, thinking he was extremely depressed, not yet aware he was in the first stages of hepatitis B, when he noticed a tall, striking woman walking out of the ocean. Her wet hair was dark, her body full-bellied, deeply tanned, soft. Not fat so much as large, big-boned, well-fleshed-out—a largeness exaggerated by the tiniest bikini. Her face was intelligent, if not beautiful. The closer she came, the older she appeared, perhaps decades older than he. One breast bore a thin, arching scar.
Divorced, wealthy, recovering from breast cancer, Gayle Sterling was thirty-eight. Her two children were only a few years younger than David. She was in Goa studying meditation and tantric healing with an iconoclastic Buddhist teacher. She guessed David was a Sephardic Jew and laughed when he said no, a California Mexican.
At Gayle’s invitation, David went to her house that evening to use the telephone. She’d rented a bungalow on stilts, all polished wood; blue paisley curtains roiled out of windows in the ocean breeze. He called Rafael, who explained that the villagers had won large financial settlements in lieu of the right to return to their homes and jobs. “Mina had a son,” Rafael said finally. “He is El Quinto. And she is Bill now, too. Billie.” David hung up the phone and found he couldn’t get up from Gayle’s sofa. This would become their joke: “David came to use the phone and never left.”
The doctor said David would die unless he made it to a U.S. hospital, so Gayle booked a flight. She told no one he was sick, or he never would have been allowed to board the plane. David would say he died en route, in the air over Burma. “I saw the bright light, and felt this enormous, sweet calmness, like falling into the most magnificent mattress.” At this point of the story, if Gayle was present, she’d burst out laughing. “He may have felt calm, but he terrorized everybody on the plane—moaning, raving, screeching like a demon. They kicked us off in Singapore and I had to bribe an entire airport bureaucracy to get us out of there.”
David spent a month in the hospital, then convalesced in Gayle’s Upper West Side apartment. Looking out the window into the quavery springtime air over Central Park, David understood what Sally
Morrot had given him along with all the conversation, the coaxing, the education: an uncanny, life-saving ability to connect with wealthy women.
Once his liver recovered, he started drinking again and couldn’t seem to stop. When the hepatitis came back, Gayle threatened to kick him out unless he went into treatment. His first sixty days of sobriety were spent in a private recovery center in the East Nineties. Upon his release, Gayle presented him with a puppy, a bluetick bitch he named Sally.
David lived and traveled with Gayle for twelve years; together, they compiled material for an international encyclopedia of alternative medicine. Then, after a remission so lengthy that doctors had called it a cure, Gayle’s breast cancer returned to kill her.
Over these years, David had news of his son from the “Mexican telegraph,” his relatives in Rito. His second cousin Carlota was Little Bill’s nanny; she smuggled snapshots and announced when the boy walked, talked, learned to swim.
When he was three years sober, David wrote to Billie, enclosing a cashier’s check for five thousand dollars to begin repaying what he’d come to regard as his debt, and begged to meet his son. The money was refused. He went to Rito hoping to talk to her and was met with a court summons alleging harassment. David didn’t fight the restraining order: too many of his relatives worked for Billie Fitzgerald, and he didn’t want to endanger their livelihoods. He put the five thousand dollars into an account that would pass to Little Bill at the age of eighteen, and kept paying into it until the sum amounted to over thirty thousand dollars.
“I told myself I was making amends to Billie by staying out of her way, by letting her dictate the terms,” David told Lewis and Libby. “But maybe I was just taking the easier, softer way.”
Libby kicked at her bedclothes. “Yes, because Little Bill’s the sweetest human being. It’s too terrible that you don’t know him.”
“Oh,” David said softly, “but I do.”
T
HE SUMMER
after Gayle died of breast cancer, David went to stay with his aunt and uncle in Rito. “I needed to come home, whatever that meant.” He obeyed the restraining order, kept off all
Fitzgerald property, laid low, and finally began learning
curanderismo
from his uncle. He helped treat patients, met with other
curanderos,
gathered medicinal herbs, slowly pulling through his grief. In the afternoons, he took long hikes in the hills. On the Chapman Peak trail, up above the lake, maybe four miles from any road, he rounded a bend and saw his son picking leaves off a manzanita bush.
The boy was blocking the trail and David had to stop. He’d spied on his son for years, though always at a great distance, and to see him this close and alone was a confusing, complicated shock. Bill was twelve then, strongly built, his warm brown skin smooth as water, his hair thick like David’s, curly like his mother’s.
“I was terrified,” David told them. “I’d trained myself to think of this moment only as a liability: it meant I was breaking the law, crossing Billie, possibly endangering all my relatives employed by the Fitzgeralds. I’d never once imagined how the love would swallow up every other concern.”
The boy talked to him as he would’ve to any other adult. He was collecting leaves for biology and needed three of each type. “Are these obovate?” He held up a manzanita sprig.
David didn’t recall much leaf typology, but told the boy that if you smashed manzanita leaves and berries together, then made a tea from the mash, you could soothe a sore throat.
The boy listened, placed the manzanita leaves carefully into a nylon knapsack, and proceeded up the trail to a sage bush. “These are lanceolate,” he said.
“Steep a couple handfuls of those leaves in a pan of hot water,” David said, “and you could ease your aching feet.”
They proceeded from sage to monkey flower, lemonade plant to sugarbush, their first conversation a cataloging of the chaparral. Bill classified the leaf and David recited its medicinal properties until, without warning, the boy said, “Okay, that’s it. Thanks a lot,” and trotted off down the trail.
David sat on a rock waiting to get his breathing back to normal. The boy was so lovely, so much his very flesh.
Taking the same trail the next day, he found his son at the same manzanita bush. David tried to be cavalier. “Picking more leaves?”
His son faced him with an expression of contempt only adolescents can muster. “Look,” he said. “I already know you’re my dad.”
On a dare from friends, a classmate in catechism at St. Catherine’s had run up to Little Bill and said, “Your father’s that crazy
brujo,
David Ibañez.”
“Is that what you think I am?” David asked. “A crazy
brujo
?”
“No,” said the boy. “You look more like a rock star.”
They saw each other every day after that, up in the hills, in many of the same spots where David and Billie had once met.
“I showed up every day, rain or shine,” he told Libby and Lewis. “I showed up until he knew I was there for him. When I was offered a job in New Mexico, Bill helped me decide to take it. We’ve been in close contact ever since.”
“And Billie never knew?” Libby was incredulous.